


The Captured Curse

by panchostokes (badwolfrun)



Series: Prompt Fics [83]
Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Entrapment, Hurt/Comfort, Jack Dalton (MacGyver TV 2016) Whump, M/M, Nick Stokes Whump, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:15:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25369714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badwolfrun/pseuds/panchostokes
Summary: Nick and Jack find themselves trapped in a trunk, and Jack comforts Nick as he has a panic attack.
Relationships: Jack Dalton (MacGyver TV 2016)/Nick Stokes
Series: Prompt Fics [83]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1540795
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	The Captured Curse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deltajackdalton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deltajackdalton/gifts).



> for delta, who sent for the prompt "Foreheads pressed together, breath intertwining, slow, content affection" and I went for gratuitous whump, bending the rules on “content” affection since neither of them are really content in this situation.

Unbeknownst to Nick, this isn’t the first time Jack has been locked in the boot of a car with a date.

Well, at that time, it wasn’t necessarily a _date_ as it was a pursuit of a con-woman who had not only conned Jack, but stole his heart in the process.

A heart that is still healing. 

A heart that is _always_ healing.

Even despite Nick’s own best effort, Jack is just as romantically cursed as he is, himself. 

And maybe their recent capture is a mutual symptom of that curse. 

It takes Nick a few minutes to recover from the mace sprayed into his eyes, followed with a taser to his back that rendered him helpless enough to be lifted up and tossed into the trunk of a car he had only managed to comprehend the color of, let alone a make and model--it was red.

Then again, his _eyes_ were red. 

Jack had fallen on top of him after his own tasing to his stomach, and an uppercut blow to the face with a pair of brass knuckles--yet another similarity to a situation Nick won’t understand the reference to as Jack stirs from his momentary knock-out to mumble something about New Orleans. 

“Jack?” Nick asks, his voice high and tight and seething as he fights the irritation in his eyes and feels his spine tingle in rigidity. The slightest movement costs him a spike of pain that he’s not equipped to handle--and even if he wanted to attempt moving his position, he doesn’t have the space for it.

“Nick?” Jack’s groans, his voice uncharacteristically nasally, as if something was still pressed against his nose. Nick feels something move against his lips. Fabric. Jack’s shirt, perhaps. “You alright?”

“Peachy,” Nick hisses sarcastically. He moves his head away as he realizes he was indeed pressed up against Jack’s back, which had landed on his face and caused a soft impact to his own nose, which is running in a rival stream of mucous to the tears streaking down his face. 

Jack’s nose, meanwhile, is running with blood. Blood that drips into his mouth. Blood that Nick feels drip onto his as Jack flips over so that he can see his companion in the dim red lighting of the trunk as the car comes to a halt. 

“Oh, Nicky,” Jack sighs in a soft voice, taking in the sight of Nick’s tightly squeezed yet swelling face before the car resumes its motion and they’re left in darkness. His eyes adjust easily, but Nick’s still haven’t recovered.

“I can’t see,” Nick’s voice quivers.

“It’s going to be okay,” Jack reassures him, he moves his head against Nick’s so that their foreheads are touching. The chemical tickles Jack’s already sensitive nostrils, he can taste the fear that spurts out in Nick’s intensifying breaths--heavy panting--no, faster than a pant, he’s _hyperventilating._

“Hey, hey, hey, it’s _okay,”_ Jack whispers, firm but gentle. He click his tongue to get Nick’s attention. “Breathe with me, c’mon...In...”

He inhales, but Nick inhales at least five times before Jack starts to hold his. 

“And out,” Jack puffs out, but Nick can’t seem to release his breath, it keeps getting caught, regurgitated, caught, regurgitated, again and again and _again_ because the air is limited, it’s running out, the trunk is getting smaller and smaller and his body’s too big for it-- _their_ bodies are too big, they’re going to get crushed, a compressed explosion, all of the air squeezed out of them leaving their bodies limp and lifeless and _vulnerable._

Well, Nick supposes, at least he’s already underground. Saves money on a burial. 

“Nick, I’m going to count to five, and as I’m counting, I want you to breathe _in,”_ Jack’s voice pulls him out of the earth, and back into the trunk. He’s reminded that his forehead isn’t pressed against a plexiglas mirror, but a human one. A stronger human than him, he darkly reflects, his heart twisting in a storm of shrinking helplessness and envy at Jack’s calmness.

“This-isn’t-my-first-time-in-a-trunk!” Nick blubbers in a fit of hysterically ascending sobs, both a plea and a protest. 

“Shh, shh, shh, you’re doing great, baby, it’s okay,” Jack pulls up a tentative hand, his ripped knuckles gently wiping away Nick’s poisoned tears before he cups his palm behind Nick’s head. “One...two...”

Nick breathes in, but shudders at--

“Three...”

The count of three is where it should have ended, that’s when it had ended before, that’s when he had been brought back to the seemingly endless surface of air in the past. 

But in the present, Jack lets them reach the count of five before they start again.

“And again...One...two...three...four...”

Nick chokes out a sob right before five. 

“I’m sorry!” he cries out. 

“It’s oka--”

“If you say it’s ‘okay’ one more time I’m gonna stick you in the gut...” Nick sniffles in a fit of sobering anger.

“One...” Jack suppresses a prideful chuckle, admiring Nick’s wit even at a time like this, “Two...three...four...five...And... _hold.”_

Jack counts to three, silently, and right before Nick’s breath bursts out between his lips, Jack gives him the permission.

“Good. Okay, we’re gonna do it again, only next time, I’ll count backwards after the hold. Ready?”

Nick moves their heads in a conjoined nod. Jack counts to five, they hold, and he begins his countdown--

“Five...four...three...two...”

Before one hits, Nick sucks in a sharp gulp of air.

“Nicky,” Jack trails his own exhale. “Just...relax. The air’ll will be there--”

“No it won’t!” Nick pounds a flailing fist onto the lid of the trunk, which earns them a muffled warning back from the other side of the backseat, and second later, they are jostled--their heads split apart and slam against each other again as the trunk lurches. 

“I’m sorry, I’m t-tryin...” Nick groans. 

“Nick, it’s--you’re doing--” Jack cycles through his codex of comfort before he settles for, “Listen, you--Nick Stokes--are one of the _bravest, smartest, strongest_ men I’ve ever met--and I’ve met plenty of men who would be long gone at this point, but you’re still here. With me. You’re still fighting this. With me. We are going to get out of this, okay? _Together.”_

Nick nods their heads again, steadies his breathing with a few affirming breaths, that slow and deepen as he reigns in his rampant anxiety. 

“Together,” he parrots, the squeezed lines on his face contorting into a more determined direction. 

“That’s it, baby. C’mon, now. In...”

He breathes in through the clearing clouds of his nose. He holds the breath in his throbbing chest. Jack doesn’t even have to ask. 

“And...out.”

He exhales, lets the breath wash over his bleeding partner, and doesn’t take another greedy helping of air until it’s absolutely necessary, and when he does, it’s with a clearer sense of calm.

“In...” Jack tips their heads up with a lift of his chin, and wordlessly conducts their breathing that at first, alternates with Nick following Jack’s lead before it slowly synchronizes and they find each other on the opposite side of the human mirror once again. 

Jack dares to smile, paying no attention to how the oozing blood trickles around the outline of his lips that tentatively approach Nick’s to bestow a reward; a soft (and bloodied) kiss as a symbol of his admiration and pride and love of how _he_ persists through his own trauma response. He tastes Nick’s tears, and the salty water almost brings tears of his own as he thinks about just how much _pain_ the man has gone through, not just in this timeless capsule but in his past as well, to have such a reaction.

A reminder that they have so much to learn about each other, and even while being the superstitious man that he is, a lesson to Jack that he shouldn’t let some silly curse ruin that potential.

“Thank you, Jack,” Nick whispers, before his wet lips blindly, hastily plant against Jack’s unmarked cheek. He tastes Jack’s blood, tastes the iron that composes his bones because he won’t be so easily broken. Not like him. Nick brings up shaking fingers to search for and stroke the darkening imprint from the brass knuckles, but finds that his fingers trace more than that--faded scars that he had mistaken for fault lines on Jack’s jagged face. He had mentioned he was in the military, but these seem to come from a situation more...intimate than a battlefield. 

Torture, perhaps, either from imprisonment or from whatever secret government work he’s only been able to vaguely tell Nick about--or more so, the work that Nick had not quite been _told_ about, but inferred based on Jack’s behavior, no matter how much he tries to hide it.

Nick’s good at hiding things too, after all. 

Just as Jack hides behind a plastered smile.

“Anytime, darlin’. It’s what I’m here for,” Jack grins. 

“What _are_ we here for, Jack? Who were those guys?”

“Didn’t manage to get a good look at them,” Jack admits. Truthfully, he was too worried about Nick to register faces and license plates. 

“Sh...Should we make a plan to bust out? They didn’t tie our hands--”

“Which must mean we’re not far from our secondary location,” Jack points out. “They were in a rush to grab us, they’ll be just as eager to get us off their hands.”

Jack squeezes his eyes as Nick finally works on opening his, racking his brain for any recent threats he’d received, any stalkers he had subconsciously registered in the back of his mind, the ones he filtered out as recognition of his own paranoia of always being followed.

But nothing comes to mind.

Just Nick’s terrified face. 

“I’m...I’m sorry I got us into this mess,” Jack gently shakes their touching heads in guilt.

“It’s not your fault,” Nick sniffles. 

“Not yours either,” Jack reminds him. “I think we’re slowing down...”

“Could be another stoplight.”

“Nah, they had been grinding to a halt on those. This might be it. The final destination.”

“Jack...”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare ya.”

“I ain’t scared!” Nick squeaks.

“It’s okay, man, my boots are quaking, too. I say the minute they open that trunk, we just start kicking and punching, the second we get a chance, we bolt. We ain’t armed and are probably outnumbered.”

“Or we can go along with it until we get a better chance. Listen to what they have to say.”

“Ain’t much for listenin' to the dumbfucks that beat up my date.”

Nick chuckles, which was Jack’s goal all along. Tension diffused. 

“We’re going to be okay,” Jack reassures him, as the car comes to a complete halt and the trunk is opened. A bright blinding light exposes the pair of men and while they’re quickly incapacitated--not without a fight--they survive. They persist.

Curses be damned.


End file.
